Jun 14, 2013 - Maxime Lefebvre, French Diplomat, Professor of International Relations, ..... among Chinese users because
The Internet and International Politics: Implications for the United States and Europe Tufts University European Center Talloires, France June 14-16, 2013 Planning Committee: Steven B. Bloomfield Karl Kaiser Robert L. Paarlberg Rapporteur: Erin Baggot
Agenda Friday, June 14 4:00-4:15
4:15–6:15
Welcome: Beth A. Simmons, Former Director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs, Department of Government, Harvard University
Session I | How the Internet Influences the Freedom of Expression and Democracy • What is the impact of social media as an instrument of advancing change through civil society’s members (including NGO’s) acting independently of governments? • How can governments or non-state actors control the Internet • The impact of the "new" media on the "old" media
Chair: Jim Hoagland, Associate Editor, Washington Post
Thomas Bagger, Head, Planning Staff, German Foreign Ministry
Philipp S. Krüger, CEO, Explorist, New York
Ben Wagner, Visiting Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
7:00
Reception and dinner at Hotel de L’Abbaye
Chair: Thierry de Montbrial, President, Institut français des relations internationales, Paris Keynote: Ben Scott, Senior Advisor, Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, Washington, DC; Visiting Fellow, Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, Berlin; Formerly Department of State, “The Internet Innovation and US Foreign Policy”
Saturday, June 15 8:30–10:30
Session II | The Role of the Internet in Concrete Cases: Successes and Failures in Regime Change • The role of social media • The case of China • The Arab Spring
Chair: Richard Cooper, Maurits C. Boas Professor of International Economics, Department of Economics, Harvard University Adam Bye, Digital Transition Leader, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, UK
Rebecca MacKinnon, Co-Founder, Global Voices Online; Senior Fellow,
New America Foundation
Zeynep Tufekci, Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
10:30
Group photo and break
2
Session III | The Internet as a New Instrument of Foreign Policy
11:00–1:00
• Its potential and limitations • Its use by the United States and other states • The impact on international politics Chair: Stephen Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs,
International Security Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School
Olaf Böhnke, Head, Berlin Office, European Council on Foreign Relations Maxime Lefebvre, French Diplomat, Professor of International Relations, Sciences Po Katherine Townsend, Special Assistant for Engagement, USAID
1:00
4:30–6:30
Lunch at Le Prieuré Session IV | Cyber Security • The nature and scale of the threat • What policy responses have been tried by major countries • How can the United States and Europe cooperate on this issue?
Chair: John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, Co-Director, Program on International Security Policy, University of Chicago Annegret Bendiek, Deputy Head, EU External Relations, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin, Germany Nicole Perlroth, New York Times, Bits Blog Terry Roberts, Vice President of Intelligence and Cyber, TASC; Former Executive Director, Carnegie Mellon Software Institute
7:30
Reception and dinner at Le Cottage Bise
Chair: Pierre Keller, Former Senior Partner, Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch & Cie Keynote: Roger Cohen, International Herald Tribune, New York Times "US Foreign Policy after the Presidential Elections" Warren and Anita Manshel Lecture in American Foreign Policy
3
Sunday, June 16 Session V | The Future of Internet Governance
9:00–11:00
• Conflicting concepts of multi-stakeholder autonomy and state control • What rules for the future Internet regime? • The follow-up of the (December 2012) Dubai UN Conference on International Communication, CANN, and ITU • The position of the Unites States, the EU, and other major actors Chair: Daniel Drezner, Professor of International Politics,
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Susan Crawford, Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Lars-Erik Forsberg, Deputy Head, International Unit, DG Connect, EU Commission Milton L. Mueller, Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
11:00
Closing remarks: Karl Kaiser and Steven B. Bloomfield
12:00
Lunch and farewell at Hotel de l’Abbaye
4
Welcome Remarks Beth A. Simmons, Former Director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Clarence Dillon Professor of
International Affairs, Department of Government, Harvard University I would like to welcome you all to our beautiful conference location at the Tufts European Center in Talloires. It's very nice to see some of the same faces year after year, but we have a record number of new faces this year— about half! This is the twenty-sixth time the Weatherhead Center has met in Talloires to discuss the issues of the day. This is the tenth time I have been involved, but I was also a rapporteur for Louise Richardson when I was a graduate student. Per Chatham House non-attribution rules , no one here will be quoted directly unless specifically asked. One of the purposes of this group is to mix scholars and practitioners. This mix has proven to be very productive over the years. The topic this year could not have been more timely. The Internet has clear impacts on foreign policy, development, and security issues. To date, the Internet has played a part in our discussions, but it has never taken center stage. I am very pleased that it is so relevant this year. It is centrally at the core of security issues and foreign policy issues. Recently, we have seen that it is possible to hack into states' software and to use high technology to conduct espionage, in ways that have always been possible but are now coming into the limelight. There are also issues that are domestic but which have international spillovers, such as the Arab Spring, stimulating calls for changes of government. We should be thinking of these issues in well-established democracies when we think about civil rights, surveillance, and the proper parameters for securing participation in democratic societies. We should also think about how surveillance comes up against privacy and civil rights. These are the issues we are going to talk about today and I look forward to a fruitful discussion. At this time I will turn it over to Jim Hoagland, chairing the first panel, on how the Internet affects freedom and democracy.
5
Session I: How the Internet Influences the Freedom of Expression and Democracy? Chair: Jim Hoagland, Associate Editor, Washington Post My voice is still at 30,000 feet so I will still use the microphone, proving that timing is everything, as we say daily in journalism. But you in academia seem to realize this as well, because you started having discussions last year on social media and the Internet. Now, the massive surveillance in these areas is roiling the press. So my hat is off to Steve and Karl for pulling off a conference on this timely topic. It is important not to confuse the urgent with the important. This is one of those topics, fortunately, which is both. I have always operated on the assumption that “democracy is the best of all bad systems,” as Churchill said, but also that it is an auto-corrective mechanism. Just like financial markets overshoot and then come back, since 2001, we have seen how the national security state has become a problem. There are lots of comparisons between Obama and Nixon, which are somewhat unfair, but illustrative. Nixon was elected during Vietnam and went too far in the reaction category. There is a strong feeling that Obama is doing the same with the War on Terror. There are analogies being made between Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg, for instance. What has become clear in the past few weeks is the massive scale of surveillance. Ellsberg had to use a Xerox to disclose such information. What we've learned is that massive amounts of information—your information—can be downloaded on CDs and be distributed without the supervision of experienced journalists and editors. What we've learned is that connectivity is what is being watched by our spies, as well as by our teenagers. They can use a telephone number to establish who someone is and the network of who that suspected terrorist is involved with. Not, perhaps, the content—as the NSA says, they are not looking at what you talk about, but whom you talk with. And perhaps Mark Zuckerberg should be the head of the CIA in the near future, because this is precisely what the NSA has been monitoring. This business model has destroyed traditional media—specifically, the resources of print media to invest in reporting. Maybe there are some silver linings here—for example, the role that NGOs are taking on in pursuing investigative reporting. One outfit is ProPublica , which provides investigative reporting to the New York Times, which is then published. This is not something we would have done ten years ago. I hope to see the same trend emerge in foreign reporting. We are also seeing a major shift in the kinds of platforms people are getting their news from. Glenn Greenwald, a blogger cum reporter for the Guardian, was contacted by a video producer, which is an increasingly important platform for journalists and non-journalists to use. Videos are increasingly inserted into New York Times opinion pages. We had been in touch with Snowden individually. Individuals seeking to break a story choose the likeminded reporters and formats they believe will give them a fair or sympathetic break. This is very much changing our strategy. It used to be that you never argue with the man that owns the printing press because he gets the last word. But it unclear who is the owner of the Internet. We have a distinguished panel to take us through this minefield of information. Thomas Bagger, Head, Planning Staff, German Foreign Ministry We will have President Obama in Berlin next week, which was meant to be a fifty-year celebration of President Kennedy's speech and the bilateral German-US partnership. But the visit may turn out very differently following the PRISM and NSA revelations. As we speak, German ministries have held press conferences to explain what Germany knew about these programs at the time and today, and to put a spin on the issue in the hopes of not completely derailing the visit. 6
During my career, I have tried to push cyber and Internet issues onto the agenda of a fairly conservative establishment that is used to issues working up to the top over many years. This crisis may actually help to move those issues to the forefront. I come to these issues not as a technologist, and perhaps as the only person in my family who does not have a Facebook account. Cyber issues are discovered here and there, and then finally everywhere. The Internet is the exemplary case of the transformative power of globalization. If we correctly consider our foreign ministries to be the prime managers of the effects of globalization, we have to make the Internet a central component of how we do foreign policy and how we look at foreign relations. Freedom of expression has been infinitely expanded by the Internet. But there is something deeply dialectic about its effects. We don't know which side, in the end, will gain the upper hand. The disappearance of time and space in reporting contributes to the increasing sense of fragility and fragmentation within societies and to rising expectations because the alternative life always seems available on the screen. It also expands the ability to expose corruption and injustices. But it is also a means to incite hatred and terrorism. There is clearly an organizational component, but there is also simultaneously an element of anarchy. In Berlin, we think about this issue in the following way: How do you prevent anyone from controlling or owning the Internet? We want to prevent this through Internet governance. The three fundamental elements of freedom, security, and prosperity—which are all massively affected by the rise of the Internet—must be kept in balance, because they are all conflicting. This reaches deeply into domestic politics and traditions concerning rights and privacy. The German foreign ministry has tried to develop elements of a foreign policy in the realm of cyber issues. We realized that we had to take a multifaceted approach—it wasn't enough to create one office, because the issues are crosscutting and involve freedom, security, and prosperity at the same time. Given this interrelatedness, how do you organize yourself as a ministry to ensure a proper balance? That is one issue we are grappling with. I'll say a final word on the impact of new media on old media. When I studied political science in Munich in the 1980s, everyone wanted to write for the two main newspapers. In the end I became a diplomat, and a lot of things have changed quickly in diplomacy, but not as much, and not as much for the worse, as in journalism. Maybe I have too melancholic of a view on this, but the old media business model has been destroyed. Both of the main German newspapers today are in a difficult transition and face a difficult decision about pay walls. Editors have been fired because they have not been able to strike this balance. This is an ongoing debate and is taking a huge toll on serious journalism and correspondent networks. One thought has stayed with me from an interview with Henry Kissinger. Kissinger asked, “if we look at international crises and issues as two dimensional, what will that do to our ability to analyze deep-rooted sources of conflict?” Today, the German and other foreign ministries must ask themselves: will this fundamentally change the way we deal with crises, if we pick information based on whatever is in the cloud at a given moment? Philipp S. Krüger, CEO, Explorist, New York Explorist commercializes an MIT technology that I co-developed there. Explorist collects engineering and science data from around the globe and uses it to build human resources management tools. We are focused on professional data, such as large infrastructure, health, and entrepreneurship projects. One of the reasons I am here today is that we see within our team social inertia that is not present in the tech community when it comes to big data. Big data has been in development for ten years, but the press is only beginning to discuss it now. On one side I am a technology geek, but I am also a policy wonk. Today, these two roles are merging. Previously, we 7
were discussing who owns the Internet. At Google, at Facebook, people would give you a very specific answer— two names, Keith Alexander, a four star US general, and Larry Page, from Google. I want to talk first about a power shift, second about control, and third about the future and what is coming next. In one minute on the Internet, 200 million emails are sent, six million Facebook pages are viewed, and 30 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube alone. This is the big data explosion. Why is this happening? There has been a contraction in storage costs and an increase in processing speeds. This is the technical reason we are discussing Snowden and the NSA. The headline of this panel was the freedom of expression and democracy, but I think we should talk about power. There have been three phases of the development of the Internet. First, the expansion of communications. We are just sixty kilometers away from CERN, where a young engineer essentially invented the World Wide Web. There were grass roots—yes, DARPA, but also Berkeley and others. This led to people having very romantic ideas about the Internet, that it would always stay this way. But fortunately, and unfortunately, we are in phase two: big data. This is not a revolution in the method of communication, but in how we process information. Every year this poses new challenges. I recently asked a colleague at Google what the biggest challenge facing his company is right now. He said it is that the amount of data shared every year is doubling. We have to make sure that tools like search engines are still meaningful. In the future, the customer will choose Google versus Yahoo versus the other companies based not only on their speed but also their privacy guidelines. We know that there has been collaboration with the NSA, and this is something many of us find very frustrating. The second topic is who controls the Internet, and how. What we are witnessing right now is PRISM. If we have someone spying on the creation of big ideas, which is what big data allows one to do, then one can tweak something. And this is a whole new model of how a player—state, non-state, or otherwise—can influence the creation and discussion of early stage ideas. We need to have a space that is private and cannot be tweaked or influenced by players with an agenda. The only way we can get there is regulation and user interest. Relatedly, we have been discussing the role of the Internet in places like Egypt. Two stages are important here: the revolutionary stage when ideas are being formed within a group, and here we have seen the revolutionary role played by Facebook and Twitter. But the second stage is consolidation. In Egypt, the rulers today are the Muslim Brotherhood and the salient meeting places are mosques. So yes, the Internet is revolutionary and can be an agent of change, but when it comes to the consolidation of power, it seems not mature enough to have an effect on the long run sustainable development of these countries. The third topic is, what does the future look like? I believe we are already entering phase three: the Internet of things. Today, there are approximately as many networked devices on the planet as there are people. By 2016, that number will double. In the United States alone, each man, woman, and child will own around nine networked devices, which will communicate with each other and which will all be connected to the Internet. This will be a huge expansion of the flow of data, not all of it meaningful. For example, our washing machines and cars will collect data. Silicon Valley is already starting to get ready for this Internet of things. Another example from the political big data realm is Jim Messina, the head of Get Out The Vote. During Obama's campaign, his algorithm told him where to send volunteers, to which block and house, at what time of day, with what message. Another facet of the future is foreign policy. The Internet has led to a power shift towards nonstate actors. Policy departments must decide how they are going to bully or charm these actors. There are differences here between United States, the EU, and China. In the United States, we definitely have the powerhouses: all the technology 8
and the collaboration between business and government. In the EU, we have none of this. There is no collaboration and there is a totally different regulatory framework. It cannot be denied that all the data goes through US routers, so the EU is in a weak negotiating spot. China has been a very different experiment since the 1990s—the Great Firewall and then the Golden Shield. They essentially kicked out Google and Facebook. However, in China there is a thriving system of big data entrepreneurs. Despite adopting a Big Brother path, it is much more alive than Europe when it comes to big data. Ben Wagner, Visiting Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations, European University Institute, Florence, Italy It is interesting that the entrepreneurs here say that we need to talk about power while the policy community says that the freedom of expression is power. In my view, this topic comes down to three questions: speech, legitimacy, and governance. Freedom of expression has moved from a world of public to private governance, with the exceptions of China and Russia. Public governance is based primarily on US values, which is beneficial in terms of bringing freedoms and embedded norms and values to the world. Thus, a default type of regulation has been created. However, there are also countries that are not happy with this and attempt to diverge from the global default. The strange thing is, the issue is never brought up. There is no way to create a global governance speech regime because no one would agree on what the content of that regime should be. The United States at Dubai tried to assert that there would not be global governance of the Internet. There is lots of talk about “multi-stakeholders” but little governance capacity being created. A cynic might say that a lot of these institutions are created to do nothing. States are realizing that regulation of the Internet is quite ineffective. Financial regulators are having the same issues—for example, now they want to see high-frequency trading algorithms. It is extremely difficult to create private spaces and there is a capacity deficit in governments. Therefore the role of the private sector is enormous. Thus, governments must rely on private sector actors for individuals' data, and then to analyze it afterwards. States are sometimes not even sure what they should try to be doing. Interstate competition also plays a role here—China has a kill switch, for instance, so the United States wonders why it does not. When discussing who owns the Internet, it has not been mentioned what actors become a proxy for: very specific professional communities. For example, Snowden looked for like-minded souls, which meant a professional or perhaps academic community of people with the same norms and values. These communities compete for the amount of agency they can have at any given time. This competition will determine, at the end of the day, who is in control of the Internet.
Discussion The chair noted that the discussion had been narrowed from the question of who owns the Internet to the more useful question of who owns big data. He also asked Mr. Krüger to elaborate on his claim that the Internet has to be protected from players with an agenda—who are those players and what does the Internet have to be protected against? Mr. Krüger responded that it is possible to be specific: Google is a major player. Server farms and software engineers (miners) are necessary for big data. Software engineers are hard to find and their salaries have skyrocketed. This represents a bottleneck—Google starting salaries can total $150,000 a year and $200,000 or $250,000 is not unusual for a young data scientist. Google has approached big data from a very different perspective than Amazon. Google has always tried to buy cheap and have redundancy within the system—it sees itself as a 9
utilities company. It structures its server farms in a certain way: it buys servers three times over, but it buys them cheap. Server farms represent the backbone of sheer data processing power. The only other player on the planet that has this is the NSA. Regarding regulation, there are two answers. The official answer is that there are regulatory institutions. However, we see an interesting situation in which Google is not really that regulated. Why is this? Really, there is a deal between the public sector and Google on this, concerning the exchange of information and the creation of jobs. The chair also asked whether Google or the government represents more of a Big Brother threat. Mr. Wagner responded that there is a need for governance capacity, with international governance of these issues probably coming within five years. Mr. Bagger said that governance capacity is a difficult discussion because within government bureaucracies, hierarchy separates top officials from these complex problems. However, focusing on private regulation would only be a matter of failing better. The broader debate is the coming systemic challenge of China. This is perhaps more the case for Europe than the United States because of Europe's sense of crisis and pessimism about the effects of globalization, especially in France. The discussion about PRISM in Germany is, what's the difference between the United States and China on big data mining and privacy? The question is, can we re-launch a transatlantic project that will serve as an integrated area of not only trade and investment, but also norms and standards, if we have major differences on privacy issues? On a global level, a consensus on Internet governance may not be possible. In closing, the chair suggested that we appear caught in an era described by Gramsci—the old is dead, the new is not yet born, and in the interim, morbid things appear. Perhaps the American founders anticipated the Internet in setting up a system that gets nothing done, as was once recommended to Nelson Mandela in terms of constitutional design.
10
Keynote “The Internet Innovation and US Foreign Policy” Chair: Thierry de Montbrial, President, Institut français des relations internationales, Paris I would like to focus on the second half of the earlier discussion: how the Internet affects democracy. Democracy is about the rule of law within nation-states and how those laws are enforced. Both the definition and the enforcement of laws is affected by the Internet. Even something as simple as the freedom of expression differs substantially between democracies—take the French and American constitutions, for example. The Internet will make it more difficult to enforce laws as well. It is extraordinarily difficult to hide oneself. Today it is almost impossible to locate an attack. Perhaps only the United States and China will be able to do this. This strategically makes things much more difficult than the Cold War nuclear challenge. These issues go to the heart of what it is to be a nation-state. If all this is correct, there are three possible outcomes: anarchy, duopoly—that is, of the United States and China, which would be painful and unacceptable for the rest of the world—or the beginning of the end of globalization. The salient question is: Are we seeing a deep change in attitudes about globalization? For example, we see the rise of nationalism everywhere. Keynote: Ben Scott, Senior Advisor, Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation, Washington, DC, Visiting Fellow, Stiftung Neue Verantwortung, Berlin; Formerly Department of State The role of the Internet is agnostic in politics. It allows one to start a protest movement and spread hate speech equally. On one hand, the gas mark and smart phone have become iconic. On the other, a fifty-year-old ex-con in Los Angeles is able to make a video criticizing Muhammad, leading to huge riots and thirty killed. Today, there are more Chinese micro-bloggers than there are Twitter users in the world. We need to adapt our methods to understand all these platforms differently. This resulted in my project at the US Department of State, where I had a blank check from Secretary of State Clinton to experiment with the Internet before it got ahead of us. The Internet is different because for the first time in history, the three forms of communication have converged: personal, news, and commercial. This represents a changing power dynamic in international relations. The dynamics of information power are changing. In 1985, the probability of someone standing next to a world historical event and having a camera was zero. Now it is close to one. Technology should be seen as a diplomatic product. For example, in Libya, Internet provision went through Tripoli and Qaddafi cut it off. Therefore, we at the Department of State spent a lot of time thinking about how to restore Internet to eastern Libya. WikiLeaks was an uncomfortable example of adapting to disruptive change. It presented a teaching opportunity—however, we failed to learn from it. In my opinion, the NSA leaks are much worse than WikiLeaks and could be a catastrophe for public diplomacy. These are all, at their essence, old debates about values over security and liberty. The problem with PRISM and Boundless Informant is that they have been applied not only to the United States but also to other countries. The credibility loss—that we are promoting open international Internet—is huge. Therefore a tragedy of the commons has arisen. This lends credibility to China and Russia. This is important because the bulk of votes on these issues are in the global south, which already has a healthy skepticism about US intentions.
11
Regarding the NSA leaks, there is a slippery slope with surveillance, where collecting information from one person becomes ten people, that becomes fifty, and then 500, and then all communications taking place in the United States. These decisions are made by a well intentioned but small group of people. Is this what we want? Drones present a similar issue; the only reason for Obama's pullback is because unlike in surveillance, people get blown up. The EU, however, provides a template. It can help contain US overreach and provide an alternative to China and Russia. Specifically, the EU could do three things. First, there needs to be a major rhetorical change about the importance of the Internet. Second, this must translate into on-the-ground realities in Internet governance. That is, there must be a change in bureaucratic competence. Third, Europe must set a standard on how regulations apply to the private sector. Specifically, this includes the freedom of expression, the relationship between law enforcement and the private control of data, interoperability, and the development of networks in the third world where they don't exist today. The debate now is whether we should retain the current system and win support for it from other governments (the US position) or to re-centralize within national sovereignty (the Russian and Chinese position). After the NSA leaks, Russia and China get to say to other countries, the United States is lying to you. This presents serious problems for US Internet diplomacy in the future.
Discussion The discussion following the dinner session was free-ranging but focused upon three topics: legal issues concerning Internet regulation, whether a broad or narrow regulatory approach was appropriate, and the quality of news produced by the new media. The first question from the audience was, what specifically and legally are we discussing when we talk about regulation and governance? What specifically do we want to regulate? Interdependence and growing externalities are important with the Internet—but these are problems that characterize other issues faced by governments as well, for example, trade. Mr. de Montbrial suggested that one answer is scale. Mr. Krüger agreed, noting that 40 percent of big data projects are canceled because legal departments tell their CEOs they are infeasible. There is increasing litigation over tainted databases that contain data protected by privacy regulations. The user is also becoming more educated and therefore is willing to pay a premium for services from Internet service providers such as spam and fraud prevention. Second, it was questioned whether it is appropriate to discuss information technology at a broad level or a specific level (for example, medical, financial, business, and climate records). Should there be different regulatory schemes for different types of information? This is the traditional approach in other regulatory realms. The difference between regulation and enforcement was also stressed—enforcement is necessary for regulation to have any meaning, and it is extraordinarily difficult here, especially in cybersecurity. The final question was asked by Professor Simmons, who drew attention to disinvestment in the old industrial media in favor of the new electronic media. What do we know about the quality of the information produced by the new media as opposed to the old media? For example, are there more errors, biases, or is it simply more shallow? Mr. Hoagland replied that the New York Times and Wall Street Journal still do investigative reporting, but the revenue to do so has been cut in half. Today's news websites tend to be more shallow and biased as a result of not having gatekeepers. For example, one Guardian blogger can post his stories without even going through an editor. There has been a great decrease in the amount of supervision and a lot gets on the Internet that is simply not true. 12
Session II: The Role of the Internet in Concrete Cases: Successes and Failures in Regime Change Chair: Richard Cooper, Maurits C. Boas Professor of International Economics, Department of Economics, Harvard University Last night we discussed some of the broader questions surrounding the ability of the Internet to foster political change, as well as complicated legal and regulatory issues. Our panelists today will bring this discussion back to earth with an examination of the role of the Internet in several specific cases. Ms. MacKinnon will tell us about the role of the Internet in China, a country we have heard a lot about at this conference. Dr. Tufekci will discuss the role of Twitter and other new media on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, where she recently documented the protests up close. Mr. Bye will tell us how the British Foreign Office is adapting to new media. Rebecca MacKinnon, Co-Founder, Global Voices Online; Senior Fellow, New America Foundation The Great Firewall of China prevents Chinese users from accessing popular social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as some search data deemed sensitive. However, some Chinese users are adept at circumventing this firewall. For example, a German arts organization website called the “Berlin Twitter Wall” was overrun by Chinese users who used the site to protest their own government's censorship. It is unwise, however, to expect that Chinese Internet authoritarianism will fall as rapidly as the Iron Curtain. We don't know what percentage of Chinese users use circumvention tools to get around the Great Firewall, but it is less than 1 percent. When I travel to Chinese campuses, I often heard that students say that they can't access my blog because it is blocked. The Chinese government is adapting to emerging digital communications technologies in a way that I call “networked authoritarianism.” In a networked authoritarian state, the party remains in control while conversations about national problems occur on social networking sites. The Chinese government accomplishes this by censoring Chinese social media and other Internet services that are operating from “within” the Great Firewall. It controls them not by blocking them but by requiring them to remove content altogether. The government also monitors online conversations closely with the help of Chinese Internet companies, whose services are dominant among Chinese users because foreign services like Facebook and Twitter are blocked. Users are occasionally successful in using the Internet to draw attention to social problems or injustices; however, the government is also able to shut down those discussions when it decides they are getting out of hand. While people feel freer to discuss issues than they would under classic authoritarianism, there is still no guarantee of individual rights or freedoms, nor are there competitive elections. Networked authoritarianism maintains state power through several techniques, including cyber-attacks on dissidents, device and network controls that log user activity (such as Blue Shield, Huadun, and the attempted Green Dam), regulations prohibiting individuals from registering “.cn” domains, and localized disconnections during times of social unrest. For example, after riots broke out in the restive and ethnically non-Han province of Xinjiang last year, the Internet, SMS messaging, and international phone service were cut off in the province for six months. To these active forms of censorship, one must add self-censorship due to surveillance. The Chinese government also adopts pro-active measures such as astro-turfing, in which the state hires people to post positive comments on social networking sites.
13
The Chinese government has effectively utilized domestic software engineers and US and European corporations to prevent the online organization of an opposition movement. Arrests on the charge of “endangering state security” have continued to skyrocket. As I explain in my book, “All university students in China's capitol now have high-speed Internet access. But when a PBS documentary crew went onto Beijing university campuses a couple years ago and showed students the iconic 1989 photograph of a man standing in front of a tank, most didn't recognize the picture at all. Networked authoritarianism explains why.” Two cases of social media mobilization in China are illustrative: the Bo Xilai affair and support for the blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng. They are illustrative because they underline the fact that social media mobilization in China can work for and against the government. Bo Xilai was a party darling who was the secretary of the central megalopolis of Chongqing. Social media played a role in the Bo Xilai affair, but to the government's advantage. It was in the central government's interest to have a lot of negative rumors swirling about Bo Xilai. Social media reinforced the message the central government wanted to perpetuate about Bo Xilai and his wife. Contrast this with the case of Chen Guangcheng, in which social media mobilization worked against the government. Before Chen escaped from house arrest, there was a movement on social media to mobilize people to visit his home. This movement reached out to Chinese citizens and also the global cadre of protesters. Though many of these visits were foiled, they embarrassed the authorities because everyone was turned away. This mobilization movement also benefited from Cultural Revolution and international imagery. It is important to remember that Chinese young people are not a monolith. The spectrum ranges from liberal internationalists to fascists. Many of those active on the Internet in China are very nationalist, very anti-American. So we should be careful about what we assume that young people want. They are also susceptible to demagoguery. Zeynep Tufekci, Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The protests in Turkey could not have happened without Twitter, because in the public sphere there is no political discussion. 60 percent of Turks are online. Therefore Turkey is an interesting case because it is developed and highly wired. Unlike China, Turkey will not shut everything down, and unlike Egypt, it is relatively developed. There is some interesting evidence that Turkey is using big data. For example, when people donate, there are callbacks to fight corruption. Mubarak may have been the last government that didn't get the power of social media. For example, Mubarak sent thugs on camels to rough up protesters, which was a godsend in terms of photo opportunities and BBC interviews. This is not the case in Turkey. In the Turkish protests, one theme is getting the government to back off, another is that people want a freer media, and a third is police repression. Citizens are drawing a line against authoritarianism. There are, I believe, more journalists in jail now in Turkey than China. The Arab Spring protesters I interviewed did not have much political experience, whereas in Turkey, many people who have been in politics for five to twenty years are involved in these protests. Therefore, the Turkish and Egyptian protests are organizationally different phenomena. I have an op-ed in the New York Times that argues, beware of the turnout machine. The issue is not whether media is digital or not. The issue is pluralistic ignorance. If individuals feel they will be repressed if they are the first to step out, there will not be a protest movement. Street movements break pluralistic ignorance because they make people feel like they are not alone in their discontents. Collective action and visibility mechanisms are important. Social media directly affects pluralistic ignorance. Most formal theories of social organization 14
assume no communication between actors. This is a significant change with social media: organizations like the NAACP are no longer crucial in organizing individuals. This might not be a great development for politics, because while spontaneous movements can draw a line in the sand, a strategic central brain is necessary to formulate specific policy demands. Adam Bye, Digital Transition Leader, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, UK I am going to talk to you about something different this morning, which is how the British Foreign Office is trying to get a grip on this new world. The background to these revolutions matters. Hierarchical structures are changing and we are moving toward a more networked world, which foreign policy has to adapt to. One illustrative example is the Berlin Wall. There was a several day lag before the start of its construction made it into US newspapers. This leisurely pace of making policy and reporting news is inconceivable now. In the British Foreign Office, we have looked at what we call the “naked diplomat.” We looked at the tasks the diplomat does, how social media has already impacted those tasks, and how we need to move forward as a diplomatic service. As Tom Fletcher, one of our tweeting diplomats said, for the first time we are able to engage directly with the citizens of the countries in which we have embassies. This has now penetrated every stage of the foreign policy process. First, communication and engagement must now involve digital. For example, in the run up to the major conferences we have hosted on Somalia, we have engaged the Somali diaspora through digital communications. The same was true for preventing sexual violence and on signing an arms treaty. We have also seen a huge increase in the number of ambassadors using social media. Second, monitoring social media has become a core part of being an informed diplomat. For example, we have used social media to find British citizens in trouble and to monitor events in Iran. Third, we can use social media to identify influential individuals. In Libya, social media helped us to identify voices that we were not aware of. Formally, individuals can comment on our policies online, but we want to take our digital strategy further by allowing diplomats to respond to questions. We have allowed diplomats to use their personal accounts to engage with individuals in the interests of implementing policy in a more open way. The mobile revolution in Africa represents a new way to deliver policy. Though digital media is blocked in Iran, it has been used to publish human rights abuses there regardless. Complaints about those abuses also were filed with us by Iranian citizens. The pollution app in China also changed the terms of debate in that country. Many questions remain however, including message control and the appropriate level of delegation. Diplomats who shun social media may turn out to be the blacksmiths of our era. We continue to grapple with how quickly to adapt to this movement.
Discussion The discussion opened with requests to contrast the Arab Spring and the riots in Turkey. What are commonalities and differences in the two cases, and what do protesters want in each? There were also calls to explore what Europeans can do to engage more in both cases. Diplomats in the room noted that the British, French, Germans, and Swedes are doing different things, which is creating a disconnect. Dr. Tufekci replied that EU engagement is crucial in the Turkish case. However, the Turkish government has become somewhat paranoid, therefore, backing off might be the best short-term strategy for the EU. Currently, engagement would punish the protestors much more than it would punish the government. The protestors feel empowered because the international community is listening to them, however, they fear that things could turn around and that the government could become much more reactionary. 15
A second audience comment was that social media protests can be scaled up quickly, as the Arab Spring and Turkey show, but it is more difficult to scale up leadership. For example, the Egyptian movement seemed to be leaderless. There was a clear goal: to get rid of Mubarak. However, consensus dissolved afterwards, and the result was that the Muslim Brotherhood came to power. Can social media foster leadership in any way? Dr. Tufekci responded that in the Turkish protests, for the first time, there have been social media leaders. However, they have organized followers around a “no, not a go” platform. Drawing a line in the sand has been a good tactic, but protesters have not been able to formulate specific proposals. Social media is open but not flat. There are structures and hierarchies, albeit informal. Structuring the narrative is important for social media organizers. Whereas in Egypt, it was difficult to find defenders of Mubarak, politics are much more polarized in Turkey. Even while protests were ongoing, around 50 percent of trending topics were for the regime and 50 percent were against. A follow-up question voiced skepticism about the ability of social media to spontaneously organize protests, given that in one of the main social media movements, Occupy, a global cadre of organizers based in New York hopscotched over the globe whenever something looking like an Occupy movement arose. Therefore, the effectiveness of social media as a protest organizer might be overstated. Dr. Tufekci replied that the Seattle 99, anti-NAFTA, and WTO networks are actually where this network comes from. These people provide the technical structure, tend to be open source, and do go from place to place. This network consists of a few hundred to a thousand people who all know each other. They have met at Republican Berlin meetings, for example. When the Arab Spring hit, there was a dense, interconnected network in place. The Arab Spring and Turkish networks are mostly separate however. Only the Arab Spring network is connected to Occupy organizers. A fourth comment was that authoritarian governments, especially China, have tried to adapt to the emergence of social media through limiting it or even using it as a tool. Are there any cases in which the government uses social media as an offensive tool? For example, as a honey pot to draw out and then ferret out dissidents? Several audience members concurred that government chokepoints are important. For example, if one must go through ISPs in order to get online and protest, identifying oneself in the process, that is a significant chokepoint. There was a consensus in the room that we should continue to think about at which point power is being exercised, by whom and over whom, and how to ensure it is being used responsibly. Ms. MacKinnon said that she has not seen the government create a fake demonstration and draw people to it in China. However, astro-turfing is used aggressively in China. All government ministries now have employees and volunteers who are recruited to spend time on various blogs in order to steer blog conversations in certain ways. Also, many government officials have their own Weibo (the Chinese version of Twitter) accounts. What you do see in terms of honey pots is hacking and cyber attacks. People working on behalf of the government have become very sophisticated at sending messages that say, click on this link because there is a human rights abuse going on, and the user is directed to a site that contains malware that installs keylogging on their computer or phone, or perhaps the ability to turn on their phone. These activities are rampant in China. In conclusion, Dr. Mearsheimer voiced skepticism about the social media enterprise. The panel has argued that social media is necessary to create protests—that deep causes alone are insufficient. However, historically there have been many protests without social media. In addition, some social media protests failed to produce substantial change, such as in Syria. In the final analysis, social media might not be that significant. Further evidence is required to prove that social media is more important than providing gossip. 16
Session III: The Internet as a New Instrument of Foreign Policy Chair: Stephen Walt, Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs, International Security Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School Governments commonly try to manipulate citizen's views of them, from President Roosevelt's fireside chats to George VI's efforts to rally the British public for the war effort as recently portrayed in the movie, The King's Speech. I want to lay out two questions. Is the goal to establish an open Internet environment? Or to use social media as a tool to achieve specific foreign policy goals? I am skeptical of the latter. For example, Obama's top foreign policy goals, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran, have not seen progress due to social media tools. Our panelists will investigate these questions. Maxime Lefebvre, French Diplomat, Professor of International Relations, Sciences Po It is interesting to consider if the Internet increases interdependence or anarchy. The difficulty is to strike a balance between freedom and security. The traditional realist viewpoint can be applied to this question: Does the Internet change the balance of power? This is a matter of cyber security. Cyber attacks are often asymmetrical. The issue is, can these attacks legitimate defense? This is not an easy question from the point of view of international law. Cyber-terrorism and corporate cyber-espionage are related issues. The Internet can also be analyzed as it pertains to globalization. It connects states and companies and increases efficiency. It also promotes democracy and transparency. It is important to preserve Internet freedom. The NSA and Google are major players in the Internet. Equal access among countries is important, and needs to be discussed at the international level. There are two fields in which regulatory advancements can be made: data collection and competition policies. Monopolies are not a good thing. In France for example, Google and Facebook have 90 percent of the market. Katherine Townsend, Special Assistant for Engagement, USAID I work on telecommunications in USAID. Telecommunications represents a powerful force for development. For example, in developing countries, a 10 percent increase in mobile phone access results in 1 percent higher GDP. The question is, how can you take advantage of global connectivity to improve development and advance US foreign policy goals? Today I will address how the Internet is changing the US approach in developing countries. I think it is doing so in a fundamental way. A few questions are pertinent. First, what is open data, and why is it relevant? Open data is machine-readable information. It is attractive because it is efficient and there are synergies with the private sector and entrepreneurship. Many developing countries have 5 to 6 percent growth rates. USAID has an incredible amount of information that is useful for the private sector. We do household surveys for example that collect consumption and mobile penetration data. We currently don't share this data in a systematic way. What are the barriers to sharing this information? First, governments have archaic structures for collecting and disseminating information. Second, governments fear changes to the status quo. Increases in transparency increase scrutiny and expose flaws. Third, there are concerns about territory and stagnation.
17
The quick solutions for these barriers are open source platforms for sharing information internally and externally. External demonstration projects would also be helpful. Such projects make observers inspired or jealous, which makes them want to replicate good projects. In this way, the Internet is changing development. More data is coming in and we are beginning to make it available to all. The Internet is also fundamentally changing our approach—problem solving has fundamentally changed.
Discussion The discussion revolved around how the Internet is changing diplomacy, if at all. Ms. MacKinnon recounted that at the International Telecommunications Union last December, many governments failed to sign the international telecommunications document that had been drafted. A number of these governments had been formerly focused on maintaining harmony among governments, but because there was a lot of civil society presence at this meeting and the decisions were very open, they ended up opposing the document even though in the presence of more privacy, they would have signed. Mr. Scott noted that when he worked at the US Department of State, the rationale for investing in the Internet was the following: The standard critique is the question suggested by Dr. Walt—how has social media impacted the Middle East and other major priorities? The answer is, it hasn't. But neither has anything else. If you accept that the Internet may play a role, the sensible thing is to invest. We are all in the information business, so as it changes, we must change. It is unclear how these things will play out, but it would be foolish to ignore them. If you set aside the headlines and think about how the banalities of information flow in everyday life, the question is, how will foreign policy change based on the fact that more information is available to people? Just as no Voice of America broadcast could be decisive, these things build up over time. Mr. Lefebvre responded that of course the Internet is changing many things. Institutions and rules will be very important. One needs to know the instruments that are available to maintain security while encouraging economic efficiency. Ms. Townsend added that civic engagement is the most important in the form of citizens holding their governments accountable. It will bring us closer to our core values: freedom of expression, assembly, and commerce. USAID is trying to use big data to develop more accurate statistics. Crop price estimates are one example: By more accurately measuring crop prices, we develop better forecasts for food prices. Another line of questioning focused on whether the Internet produces greater cooperation or competition between states. For political scientists, is the Internet revolutionary? Has the balance of power been changed? Has the Internet systemically changed the international system in any way? For example, Freedom House reports that global democracy has decreased every year for several years now. Mr. Lefebvre suggested that insofar as the Internet is about individuals, not states, it facilitates cooperation rather than conflict. Ms. Townsend suggested that there is greater competition, but not greater conflict. Hopefully, the push toward transparency will lead to more stakeholders in the policy making process. Ms. Perlroth said that to infer that the Internet has no impact on diplomacy is clearly false if attacks like Stuxnet are possible. The discussion reminded Dr. Mueller of the “media effects paradigm”—we treat a technology as an independent variable and say that society is treated with it. This is not a good way to approach the issue. When people say “the Internet,” they are getting off on the wrong foot. The Internet facilitates the interaction of autonomously operating networks. There is a process of inter-networking of tens of thousands of these networks within the United States. Autocracies are cracking down on citizens because of the threat of the Internet. Cyber warfare is 18
certainly transforming diplomacy, insofar as countries are investing billions of dollars. So in specific areas, we certainly see people adapting to the capabilities of inter-networking. The Internet is identified with transparency. WikiLeaks is an undesirable form of transparency. Secrecy is radically incompatible with the Internet. The word negotiation has not arisen in this discussion, but it is at the very heart of diplomacy. Dr. Walt agreed, noting that Dr. Nicholas Burns at the Harvard Kennedy School has argued that the WikiLeaks threat undermines candid diplomacy, concurrently and five years down the road from negotiations. There was also a debate concerning the usefulness of big data. A conference participant commented that the Internet does not foster charismatic leadership and community; instead, it is an unfiltered domain of faceless voices commenting in the ether. Total data is useless in some ways—it is discernment by historians that matters in society. The Internet undermines the capacity for critical human discernment. Closing statements focused on long range and unintended effects of the big data revolution. Dr. Walt questioned the unintended consequences of more transparency—for instance, might we just start to care less about all the information we gather about politicians? Mr. Scott proffered the hypothesis that many foreign policy affairs attributed to the Internet are in fact the Internet's amplification of old things. Dr. Drezner questioned how, twenty years from now, the ascent of a new generation of leaders who grew up with these things will affect international relations.
19
Session IV: Cyber Security Chair: John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science, Co-Director, Program on International Security Policy, University of Chicago There are two main topics on the table in this session: cyber security and the cyber-threat. One can think of the cyber-threat as a two-by-two table common in political science, with the sides labeled [great, not great] and [can deal with, cannot deal with]. The question is, is it possible for the United States, Europe, and other states to cooperate? There are differing European and American perspectives here. Another issue is who controls the web and if this matters for thinking about responses to the cyber-threat. Additionally, does cyber warfare have first strike advantage? Annegret Bendiek, Deputy Head, EU External Relations, German Institute for International and Security Affairs, Berlin, Germany I will present the European approach to cybersecurity and discuss the internationalization of justice. I will discuss why it is relevant, the key actors in the EU, and which driving forces can be identified. I work for a German think tank inside the German government. Policy reports commonly divide risk into three baskets: cyber crime, espionage, and war. The international community has yet to reach a consensus on the definition of these three topics. This is particularly difficult because of the attribution difficulty. There is a fundamental disagreement about the appropriate scope of government regulation in this field. A Cambridge study argues that we should spend less in anticipation of cyber crime and more in response. This requires international law enforcement cooperation and depends upon mutual legal assistance treaties such as the Budapest convention. This is an idealist approach to cybersecurity. This requires states to trust each other and have relatively the same views on the legal aspects of cybersecurity. The level of interconnection goes beyond borders and justifies international cooperation. The February 2003 framework is a good approach to risk governance. It was based on five priorities: (1) achieving cyber resilience, (2) reducing cyber crime, (3) developing industrial and technological resources for cybersecurity, (4) applying offline EU values to the online world, and (5) compelling all member states to achieve a secure digital environment in numerous sectors, including finance and corporate information. The EU should focus on preventing and mitigating adverse effects of the Internet through home office policy. The blurring of boundaries between external and internal policies is relevant, as well as between securitization and privatization. Terry Roberts, Vice President of Intelligence and Cyber, TASC; Former Executive Director, Carnegie Mellon Software Institute I was involved in computer network defense and operations in the late 1990s in the intelligence community. I came back to it after I retired from government four years ago and had a chance to focus on what was going on technically. I was astonished to find that we were dealing with the same issues as in the 1990s, but they had grown exponentially. The question we must ask is, is there any work we are doing in this world, aside from physical labor, that does not take place online? This environment is where we are doing our work, our socialization, and our communication— this is what makes it such an important realm. The bad news is that bad guys love it and leverage it too. 20
We didn't design resilience into the architecture of these systems when they were created. We did not have a topography of the environment back then because it was still evolving. We don't have awareness of our systems consistently. And we only know the networks that we have put in place. Therefore there is a very high threshold of vulnerability. I think that crime is the biggest risk to our environment. There is non-attribution if you are very good: You can steal millions and you have numerous targets to go for at any time, be it financial or intellectual property or deleting items from inventories. We are losing tens of billions of dollars in the United States every year through crime in this environment. The dynamic is: don't let anyone know because my company is at risk. So this crime is happening, but corporations are keeping it low key. The breadth of actors is also important. There are state actors, formal and informal groups, activists, and individuals with extra time on their hands. It resembles the Wild West. Unlike any other “warfare” or adversarial realm, we are in conflict 24/7. It is not “how do we prepare,” it is “we are under siege.” One must have the ability to shut things down when one needs to and one must have team support. Information sharing is important across companies and sectors. The other way to raise the bar is to promote unclassified cyber intelligence to raise situational awareness on these issues so that corporations can prevent rather than react. Research and development in this field would also be very helpful. There is some research and development, but it needs to be ratcheted up and shared. Finally, more educational training is important because there are not enough people to fill jobs. Nicole Perlroth, New York Times, Bits Blog The biggest threat we face is simply a basic lack of understanding. Three years ago I was working at Forbes covering venture capitalism and the New York Times called me to offer a job on cybersecurity. Hackers showed me how you can use video conferencing software to take a tour of boardrooms around the world. You can zoom in and read papers on the table. You can also see who those corporations have video conferenced with recently. A parable goes, there are only two kinds of companies left in the United States: companies that have been hacked by China and companies that don't know that they've been hacked by China. It was difficult to tell this story, because corporations like Lockheed Martin don't want to talk about their experiences. Then the New York Times was hacked. Someone we called the “Summer Intern” accessed our network every day at 10am and walked around our server. They were after the source network of David Barboza's Pulitzerwinning piece on Wen Jiabao's network. The most dangerous target would be companies that make smart-grid software which sits on top of electricity, watershed, and utilities systems. China hacked one of these and the US government launched an effort to name and shame them into stopping this. The United States has very little ground to stand on here. Another danger is presented by zero-day exploits, vulnerabilities in software that have never been found before. This led to Stuxnet. There is a huge commercial market for these exploits. I once asked a hacker, who would you not sell these vulnerabilities to? He refused to answer. The NSA is developing offensive cyber teams, while the Department of Homeland Security is falling behind because it can't assemble teams to prevent these attacks.
Discussion The discussion began with an application of international relations theory to the question of Internet governance. Dr. Drezner asked, is there any arena in cybersecurity where deterrence logic still does apply? If not, is there a more appropriate framework? 21
Ms. Roberts suggested that deterrence can work with a state like China, which respects states and authority. With individual terrorists or hackers or Anonymous, deterrence is not useful. It is technically feasible for the Northeast power grid to be off in forty-eight hours. This is the kind of catastrophic event that could occur and would be cheap to perpetrate. The question is, how should the United States protect itself from that? States should protect these infrastructures as they do their nuclear weapons. There is a huge movement to protect critical infrastructure. Ms. Perlroth added that deterrence is complicated by the fact that state actors can easily hire nonstate actors to launch cyber attacks. It makes sense for China to hire unofficial associates, such as Tencent, so they can deny relations. Currently, the actors who have the ability to do us harm—China and Russia—are deterred from doing so. The risk is that other actors are learning. Iran, for instance, is hitting US banks with denial of service attacks every day. Mr. Mueller suggested that cyber attacks are not as dangerous as posited. Stuxnet took advantage of four different zero day exploits, one of which was the Microsoft update system. It had a budget in the tens of millions of dollars. Thus, major attacks are expensive and technically complicated. Also, we must ask ourselves: has the Iranian nuclear program been stopped? Has the regime been overthrown? What do we get? The United States is not interested in a cyber treaty because it believes it has the advantage. Following questions about whether attribution really is impossible and how zero day exploits are purchased, Ms. Bendiek clarified that the US government has said that it is able to attribute attacks. The belief system in the EU is completely different and Europeans do not believe in cyber deterrence. Tech people say that Chinese are in the lead and the United States is lagging behind. Ms. Roberts added that she would like to see broader partnerships to share zero-day exploits. It is very difficult and sometimes impossible to determine attribution. But there are nontechnical means. If one gets ahold of a platform, one can do forensics. This combination of sophistication and the overall approach is important. The focus should be more on the partnership than the treaty advantage. The United States is not going to give up the advantage it now has, however it could work with the EU to be a leader on standards sharing. Ms. Perlroth described the zero-day exploit market in greater detail: Military contractors, Google, and other players are looking for these vulnerabilities. If you are a hacker, for example some kids in Brazil, you sell it to a broker, who resells it. This usually happens at seedy hotel rooms at tech conferences. This should not be regulated, in my opinion. There would still be a kid in Brazil who knows he could sell the exploit for $150,000, and it he can't sell it to the United States, he will sell it to Iran. There are ongoing attacks on US energy firms. There is a cyber-industrial complex, however. I commonly receive 300 emails from politicians after I publish an article saying they have the answer. The Pentagon is being cut, but cyber is not, which is good news. Additional questions focused on the extent of the danger posed by cybersecurity issues. Mr. de Montbrial asked if it really the case that low-cost catastrophes perpetrated by a small group of smart actors are impossible. Could we wake up tomorrow with the financial system collapsing due to this threat? Ms. Bendiek responded that energy and finance are generally in good shape. Other sectors, like healthcare, still need to establish basic standards. They need help from government and other private branches. This is a fruitful area for transatlantic cooperation.
22
Ms. Roberts said that regarding the impact of small groups, it's all about skill, opportunity, and intent. If one (like Snowden) has the keys to the kingdom—access—then they can get root-level access and do a lot of damage. Skill and opportunity are much more important than money. Ms. Perlroth added that the situation with nonstate actors is like that with weapons of mass destruction. The people who have them are deterred from using them, and the people who don't have them don't yet have the skills to get them. We are headed towards a world in which only the wealthiest states and individuals can hide themselves on the Internet. For now, it's still possible to identify actors who don't have the skills of the United States, China, or Russia. I use Gmail for everything because I trust that Gmail is the most secure. For Sergey Brin, this is a very personal issue. Google is hiring the best and brightest. Final questions revolved around a potential cybersecurity legal regime—in particular, whether a global new deal on data would be possible. Ms. Roberts said that individual attribution would be possible: a PKI protocol that would indicate a user's identity. This is debatable and the pros and cons must be weighed. In the US government, an interagency cyber council has been implemented. It's not smooth, but it is necessary. Outside advisory councils are also important to keep developments grounded in academia, business, industry, and society. Ms. Perlroth concluded that despite these dangers and privacy issues, ultimately we have to live our lives.
23
Keynote “US Foreign Policy after the Presidential Elections: #ComebackKid” The Warren and Anita Manshel Lecture in American Foreign Policy Chair: Pierre Keller, Former Senior Partner, Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch & Cie Tonight we must focus on Obama's foreign policy. Despite his initial speeches in Cairo and elsewhere and a very active Secretary of State, his foreign policy was remarkably restrained. In what direction will his second-term policy proceed in Syria, Iran, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in regards to the environment? It must be asked if Obama is giving due attention to foreign policy or if he is focused primarily upon domestic issues. Roger will enlighten us about Obama's second-term foreign policy, which remains a riddle wrapped in an enigma, in Churchill's terms. Keynote Speaker: Roger Cohen, International Herald Tribune, New York Times Allow me to take you offline for a moment where a few things have been going on. I know it’s annoying to be distracted from your smart devices. As my fifteen-year-old daughter subtly puts it when I try…“Dad…goodbye.” Well, hello everyone. The French, since the surveillance uproar began, have been demanding “le droit a l’oubli”—“the right to be forgotten.” That is an interesting idea. There is also a right not to be forgotten. When memory dies, impunity reigns. A right not to be forgotten for the almost 100,000 Syrian dead in a conflict where the ineffectual huffing and puffing of the United States and its allies has reminded me of my pre-Internet years in Bosnia. For the 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians now in the forty-sixth year of an occupation that humiliates them and corrodes the state of Israel. For a Middle Eastern region where from a shaky Egypt to a combustible Iran the need for effective American diplomacy is pressing. We do not want, we absolutely do not want, a third Middle Eastern war just as we withdraw from Afghanistan. As the post-September 11 years have shown, it is possible to stumble into bloody things that are hard to stumble out of. Yes, we got Osama bin Laden—that was a huge. But the disappointment in Germany of which Ben spoke last night is not limited to Germany. There has been about President Barack Obama a dissonance. On the one hand, the soaring rhetoric of this man precociously presented with a Nobel Peace Prize—about bending the arc of the world’s affairs toward justice. More prosaically, he has spoken of closing Guantanamo, restoring due process, adjusting the balance between security-driven surveillance and personal freedoms, curtailing drone warfare, and limiting the bulked-up powers of the executive. On the other, we have seen the maintenance of precisely those powers concentrated in the White House by his predecessor: increased drone warfare; the dispatch of more forces to Afghanistan with dubious results; the surveillance programs that have Europeans up in arms; and the prolongation of Guantanamo’s life. Why this inconsistency between words and actions? Because the last thing Obama can afford to be seen as is an angry black man taking on the military and security establishment in the name of his liberal ideals? Because fighting terrorism is so intractable that painful compromises must be made? Or because in reality Obama’s liberalism is no more than a veneer and he is at heart a tough pragmatist, a lawyer always looking for middle ground, a man onto whom many ideals were projected by his supporters, but who in reality, carries little of that fuzzy baggage? 24
Perhaps all of the above in some degree: We will see. Lame-duckness is a liberating condition. Will Obama’s United States now better align means and objectives in an effective way? In nobody’s world, in the cacophony we have discussed, setting an agenda is arduous work. I believe we need more of four things: leadership, diplomacy (unfashionable word, Thierry, thank you for reminding me of it), consistency, and courage. But first perhaps we should ask if a power like the United States that is past the apogee of its dominance still has the vigor and treasure to exert a strong foreign policy. The American century is over and no one has staked a convincing claim to this one. There is talk of a post-American world (Fareed Zakharia), of a non-American world (Parag Khanna), of the “dispensable nation” (Vali Nasr). Gideon Rachman urges the United States to be up-front about its relative decline and difficulties, like a child confessing to having spent all her allowance. Charles Krauthammer counters that “declinism” is a choice—and the wrong one. There is, it seems, little clarity for all the information buzzing around the world’s hyper-connected networks. Surprise is always possible. The two major liberating events of my lifetime—the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Arab Spring—were foreseen by nobody. Macmillan said, “Events, dear boy, events,” when asked what worried him most as a politician—the same may be said of a columnist. You just never know how stupid you may look in the light of them. So I proceed with trepidation. Having done the heavy global lifting for many decades now, perhaps the United States should pass the torch and focus on itself. Since September 11, the nation has lived through two wars without victory in Iraq and Afghanistan fought at a cost of well over a trillion dollars, the devastating financial meltdown of 2008, and a faltering recovery with a low job harvest. It has watched the rise of the rest, and particularly China, whose economy will be larger than America’s within about a decade. The power shift to Asia is indisputable. So is the power dilution at the expense of governments inherent in all our cyber-chat here. High debt and political polarization eat away at US national will. For all President Obama’s effort to restore America’s image post-Iraq, plenty of people still love to hate the USA, whether for its drone strikes, or the Utah big-data facility, or just out of the unfocused quasi- adolescent angst that produced the Boston bombers. Americans, with reason, are tired of war and nation-building. The unipolar moment of the 1990s is long gone. With George Washington many ask, “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?” Yet there is another story. This limping power still accounts for well over a third of world military expenditure, is the only nation capable of projecting military force globally, and maintains the garrisons that constitute the framework of an enduring Pax Americana that the world is now reluctant to acknowledge. In per-capita terms, China’s economy remains a fraction of the size of the US economy and will for a long time. American universities are a magnet to global talent, as are the technology companies, whose names are embedded in the world’s imagination. In a networked world the networks are principally American. Creative churn produces innovation in fields like bio- and nanotechnology at a faster pace than elsewhere. Demography favors America over most other developed nations with their declining population (1.5 million in Germany went missing recently, by the way, pouf, just vanished!) US energy self-sufficiency is less than a generation away, a dramatic shift. The soft power of Hollywood shows no sign of abating. Anti-Americanism can easily be overstated: Many middle-class Europeans and Arabs will close a diatribe against American “imperialists” with a question like, “Oh, by the way, can you help me get my daughter into Harvard?” Not least, a dozen years into the Great Disorientation that followed September 11, America’s political system remains resilient. The war on terror that President Obama has now promised to end skewed America’s checks and balances—in some ways the country has been living in an undeclared State of Emergency—but did not destroy them.
25
So if I had to choose a hashtag for the United States, I think I’d go with “#comebackkid” rather than “#yesterdaysnews.” Sure, I am a naturalized American. I chose America. Perhaps my spectacles are therefore rose-tinted. But I think not. No nation has ever been as hardwired to self-renewal. That admirable French motto, “Plutot mourir que changer”—“Rather die than change” —does not work in Silicon Valley. Foreign policy depends fundamentally on domestic power. On that basis, in my view, America’s world role is not about to fade. The country will not retreat into a shell. Indeed it cannot: Its economy is inextricably tied to China and the world. There is no more “foreign ground,” in Washington’s words. But what will America do right here in the real world? I sat recently with Salaam Fayyad, the outgoing Palestinian prime minister in Ramallah. Ill-served, brave Fayyad, a Palestinian leader with a preference for action over rhetoric, for the future over the Nakba, a man hung out to dry by the Israelis and by Obama and by his own Fatah movement, and just hated by Hamas. He spoke to me about Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempts to revive Israeli-Palestinian talks on that ever-receding thing: a two-state solution. “It’s a high-risk strategy,” Fayyad said. “The idea seems to be to get the parties easing into negotiations encouraged by economic investments. But how can this work if there is no new design, no new idea? This seems to be a recipe for Barcelona-type football, tiki-taki, running the clock down. How reassured can I be about a mega-project for tourism on the Dead Sea when north of here there are Bedouins who have no water? What about settler violence, evictions, demolitions, the endless violations by Israel of our right to life? There is nothing to underpin this US strategy, so I think it will crash. The question Obama needs to ask Netanyahu is: What do you mean by a Palestinian state? A state of leftovers is not going to do it. Perhaps Netanyahu believes Israelis have a contract with God Almighty who gave them the land, but there happen to be 4.4 million people on this land who want to exercise their right to self-determination and statehood, so perhaps we can adjust the divine contract a little.” The Palestinian national movement is cripplingly split. It is undermined by division over objectives: two states at the 1967 borders give or take agreed land swaps (achievable); or the 1948 borders (a pipe dream); or, the same thing put another way, one state (that is, the eradication of the state of Israel). Yes, Palestinians have made a lot of mistakes. Still I understand Fayyad’s anger. US policy since 2008 has been a hopeless muddle, bereft of those things I mentioned earlier: leadership, diplomacy, consistency, and courage. Obama started in Cairo in 2009 by saying “the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable,” and “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements….It is time for these settlements to stop.” In a sense he was stating the obvious: There cannot be a Palestinian state if the land for it keeps eroding. Obama ended his term vetoing his own words on settlements in a resolution at the United Nations. Outmaneuvered by Netanyahu (and his twenty-nine standing ovations in Congress), he surrendered principle to political calculation with an election looming. This was not a happy episode in American foreign policy. In his second term, he has started on the opposite track. He went to Jerusalem. He reassured Israel: the United States had its back and Palestinians must recognize that it is a “Jewish state.” Settlements were now “counterproductive” rather than illegitimate. He made a speech that, in theory, could be a prelude to demanding some tough choices from Israel in the interests of peace. But, as Fayyad intimated, without leadership, diplomacy, consistency, and courage it is a safe bet that Netanyahu will kick the can down the road. With per-capita GNP in the West Bank at $1,500 and in Israel at over $35,000—and remember those places are no further apart than Brooklyn and Midtown—the prime minister has the means to tough it out.
26
I have mentioned diplomacy a couple of times. It is an almost quaint word. So let us remind ourselves of what it involves. Effective diplomacy—the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an end to the Cold War on American terms, or the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia—requires patience, persistence, empathy, discretion, boldness, and a willingness to talk to the enemy. Our Internet Age is, however, one of impatience, changeableness, palaver, small-mindedness, and an unwillingness to talk to bad guys. The space for realist statesmanship of the kind that produced the Bosnian peace in 1995 has diminished. The late Richard Holbrooke’s realpolitik was not for the squeamish—but at Dayton nobody was tweeting. There are other reasons for diplomacy’s demise. The United States has lost its dominant position without any other nation rising to take its place. America acts as a cautious boss, alternately encouraging others to take the lead and worrying about loss of authority. (The US decision to send small arms to Syrian rebels has come more than two years into the conflict—an appalling abdication, in my view. Perhaps with Samantha Power at the UN we may do a little better.) Violence, of the kind diplomacy once resolved, has shifted. It occurs less between states than within them or with terrorists. As a result, the military and the CIA have taken the lead in dealing with countries like Pakistan. On Capitol Hill, diplomacy is a word shunned because of its wimpy associations—trade-offs, compromise, pliancy, concessions, and the like. Many representatives prefer beating the post-September 11 drums of confrontation, toughness, and inflexibility. I think it is possible to imagine a new era of diplomacy in Obama’s second term. Outside Burma, he has had no major breakthrough (although I would call the US decision to engage fully with the Moslem Brotherhood a breakthrough, if a belated one.) But he will have to have the courage to tell Congress that diplomacy is not conducted with friends. It is conducted with the likes of the Taliban, the ayatollahs, and Hamas. It involves accepting that in order to get what you want you have to give something. The central question is: What do I want to get out of my rival and what do I have to give to get it? Or, put the way Nixon put it in seeking common ground with Communist China: What do we want, what do they want, and what do we both want? This brings me to Iran. As I speak, a moderate cleric Hassan Rowhani has triumphed in the presidential election. I was in Tehran four years ago and will never forget the millions of brave Iranians, many of them women, marching to demand a fair count of the vote. They encountered brutal repression. The Green Movement did not disappear. It was forced underground. Rowhani has won because the reformist sentiment of 2009 still prevails. Iranians are proud; many are highly educated. Their median age is twenty-seven. They want a modern state connected to the world; they do not want to be pariahs. Sanctions will not bring them to the table. Coercion will not bring them to the table. Independence from the West—Khomeini’s “bullying powers”—stands at the ideological core of the Islamic Republic. The nuclear program (like the nationalization of the oil industry for Mossadegh) is the most potent expression of that Weltanschauung. This will not change with a Rowhani presidency—and Ali Khamenei is still the supreme leader. But Ahmadinejad, by virtue of what he said about the Holocaust and other matters, was an obstacle to everything. Diplomacy with Iran has not been seriously explored. It would require commitment and subtlety. As the Persians says, “Not everything round is a walnut.” Obama wrote to the leaders of Turkey and Brazil in 2010 appealing for help. They duly reached the outlines of a deal with Tehran along the lines the president had suggested, only for the United States to declare it inadequate the next day and rush for tougher sanctions. 27
This was not a happy moment in American foreign policy: It displayed inconsistency and wavering leadership, as well as suggesting that the United States is not serious about working with the emergent powers. War with Iran, that third war I mentioned, is unthinkable, its potential consequences devastating. Avoiding it will require asking those tough questions I outlined. As with Israel-Palestine the basic architecture of a deal is known to everyone, as are the concessions needed from both sides. But will Obama lead rather than calculate, look to his legacy rather than be a prisoner of Congressional histrionics? A couple of quick observations: Perhaps the most important foreign-policy words Obama has uttered are these four sentences pronounced last month: “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” Yes, the President’s authority to wage war wherever and whenever he pleases, accorded in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attack, must be repealed. Obama quoted James Madison: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” America’s authority is tied to its moral stature as a state of laws committed to freedom: Flying US robots dropping bombs out of diverse skies on scattered nations undermines that authority over time. The war on a noun must end to strengthen American foreign policy in the second term. Perhaps that’s what “pivot to Asia” really means. Otherwise it means nothing. A second point: It has become fashionable to refer to the “so-called” Arab Spring or trash the epithet itself. This is wrong-headed. From Benghazi to Cairo, from Tunis to Sana, a furious debate is engaged—between Islamists and liberals, the military and civil society, men and women. The Arab world has unfrozen itself. Was that ever going to be a smooth process? No. Our digital reflexes leave us ill-prepared for generational change. Yet that is the nature of change. Even in Germany, after 1989, it took twenty years to integrate the East and even then many were disappointed: As one revolutionary put it, “We dreamed of paradise and woke up in North Rhine Westphalia.” Forget paradise. The United States must remain committed to the deepening of the new Arab openness, its framing within institutions, and the preservation of democracy. This is a strategic imperative. The ousted Arab despotisms were jihadi factories. The new is not yet born—thanks, Jim—but it is better than the old. And it tells me that there is only one conclusion to the Syrian nightmare: the departure of the Assad family after more than forty years of brutal rule. Here’s a story about America in the world. The leader of the world’s seventeenth-largest economy wants to build a mall over a city park. He’s a skillful ruler with more than a decade at the top, used to getting his way. But like anyone he can make mistakes. People are fond of the park called Gezi; they have memories of it, a place not yet swept away in an old city hell-bent on modernization. Such attachments are irrational but no less strong for that. The park lovers gather, they chant, they occupy. They tweet with the hashtag “DirenGezi”—Resist Gezi! The leader has befriended an oligarch, favored him with the usual lucrative networks, and this oligarch owns as a sideline a popular chain of steak restaurants. The tweet goes out, “DirenEntrecote”—Resist Entrecote! The Twitter-coordinated protest spreads. Now it is about more than a park. It is about the autocratic turn of this conservative leader who is giving himself the airs of a Sultan. The quasi-Sultan—he hates the comparison—gets irritable. He calls the protesters alcoholics—immoral apostates who even kiss on the subway. Cue the hashtag Kissonsubway: Couples on the Ankara and Istanbul subways all kiss at the same moment. The president is furious at this affront to Islam, as he sees it. He is confronted by a movement that does not even have a leader. Its slogan might be something as vague as “Enough is Enough!” Yet it fans out like sailboats on the Bosphorus on a sunny morning. 28
The pattern in Turkey is familiar by now: Small spark, large conflagration; vertical rigid state power, flat nimble protest movement; stern authority, impish youth; force of the state, flexibility of Facebook; agitated leader, leaderless uprising; stern warnings, humorous ripostes. The analogy with the Arab Spring is inexact, Turkey is a democracy. But its echoes are everywhere, not least in the element of surprise. In a world where word spreads instantaneously, movements develop fast. Fidel Castro spent years in the Sierra Maestra preparing his Revolution. Twitter has dispensed with all that. Never has agility in foreign policy been at such a premium. I said this was a story about America in the world. Well, no, it’sprincipally about Turkey. But as with Germany, so with Turkey: the United States is thereabouts, a NATO ally, providing a form of security that allows for the slow evolution of democracy, first an overseen democracy and with time a more vigorous and independent one. At least that is my hopeful view. The United States remains the great offsetting power. Without its presence in Asia, China could not have risen so peacefully. We forget these major foreign-policy contributions too easily. W.G. Sebald, the great German writer, once wrote: “Whenever one is imaging a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner.” This is true. The phrase may, however, be inverted, “Whenever one is imaging the next disaster, a bright future is just around the corner.” I am certain that belief animates the brave foreign service officers of the United States. None was braver than my friend, the late Chris Stevens, killed in Benghazi. I see him in his hotel room— “the impromptu embassy”— during the war, living out of a suitcase, wide smile on his face, exuding wisdom on Libya and the Arab world in general, cracking jokes as gunfire crackled around the city, working hard to help get the forces opposed to Qaddafi organized, respectful and knowledgeable of the local culture, appalled by the decades-long abuses of the regime, animated by a love of freedom, a true American public servant. I like to think he embodies the best of American foreign policy—courageous, consistent, diplomatic, and unafraid to lead, the very qualities the Obama Administration has yet to summon. Obama was not at his best in handling Stevens’ death (the Republicans were even further from their best). The president might do worse than inspire himself now through Stevens’ example. As Lewis Carroll wrote, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
29
SESSION V: The Future of Internet Governance Chair: Daniel Drezner, Professor of International Politics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University There have been two changes in the distribution of power in Internet governance. First, China, Russia, and Gulf states are increasingly powerful and want more control over the Internet. Second, there are now firms whose existence is predicated on that of the Internet. They have growing lobbying power. These issues came to a head at the 2012 Dubai conference. The panelists will explain what happened. Lars-Erik Forsberg, Deputy Head, International Unit, DG Connect, EU Commission The multi-stakeholder approach is important in Internet governance. There are US-EU differences on this topic. Both the United States and EU are very attached to the multi-stakeholder way of doing things. This reflects how decisions are taken in modern society. This concept is embedded in WCIT. China and Russia are not afraid of the fragmentation of the Internet and are trying to set up an intranet more than anything else. Many other countries profoundly believe the multi-stakeholder approach should function but have some problems with the current configuration. It should be stable, resilient, free, and one. Some say that the Internet governance system is one in which nothing gets done. In fact, things get done behind the scenes. The strong and powerful are the ones running these things, which is a concern that we have in Brussels. The governance of the Internet today is not inclusive. Latin America, Africa, and Asia are not well represented. We have two problems with ICANN, although it functions relatively well. It is a bit strange that it is a private American company, though it is nonprofit. So the first issue is the transparency and accountability of ICANN. Its board is extremely powerful. Its operations are quite opaque. ICANN has a new president who is working on this, so I am hopeful about improvements. ICANN has decided to be very broad on opening generic top-level domains. This would involve the development of “.com” alternatives, e.g. “.health”. This would be a way of opening up and would generate an enormous amount of money. What will this nonprofit do with this money? It is up to them to prove it to us. Secondly, ICANN is still a show for the few. There are 192 countries in the world, out of which 120 are members. When we meet every four months, roughly 50 show up. It is very much a talk show between the US and EU, and sometimes Canada and Australia. Africa and Asia are poorly represented. For example, there have been 911 applications for generic top-level domains from North America, 675 from Europe, 333 from Asia, 24 from Latin America, and only 17 from Africa. There is also an Internet governance forum, however it is not very productive. It needs to have more outcomes. The Dubai conference focused on updating international telecommunications regulations. China, Russia, and Iran would like to have a much more regulated Internet globally. Then they could say that governments have the right to regulate whatever they want in their countries. This is what we are trying to avoid. The United States, EU, and other states such as Kenya are strongly opposed. Dubai was split into these two camps. At the end of the day there was a consensus on a text, but in the last minute there was a coup d'état led by Iran that led to a new insertion in the text. There was a vote and the new text won. The EU could not accept it. These organizations must develop much more tangible rules. We are also trying to bridge the gap to countries in the middle. GIPO—the Global Internet Policy Observatory—is trying to put together an informational web based platform for countries that feel undecided about this complex multi-stakeholder way of dealing with the Internet. 30
How can the EU take on this challenge? I think we can. Now we are acting more or less like one within the group of twenty-seven. We must continue to act coherently. We need a firm commitment from the member states to work together on this issue and to continue to work with the United States. We also should bring in like-minded countries like Brazil and India. Susan Crawford, Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Roger mentioned leadership, consistency, diplomacy, and courage last night, which are very human qualities. Internet governance issues, however, seem very cold. I want to make these issues feel as consequential and human as access to clean water, electricity, and other things needed for human flourishing. I was a New York lawyer involved in starting ICANN. I was on the ICANN board for three years. It feels like doing jury duty for the Internet. It is a tremendous responsibility. I then served in the White House as a special assistant for innovation and technology policy. And I am an academic. The Internet is nothing but a simple agreement by computers to do two things: to take digital information (1s and 0s) and chunk them into identically sized packets, and to use globally unique identifiers. Every device has its own number. We agree to use those set of numbers. That's all the Internet is. Because it is so simple, data can be sent without asking for permission. It is also completely indifferent to everything above it (type of information) and everything below it (fiber optic cables, air waves, etc.). This is the most exciting development of my lifetime: the ability of everyone around the world to speak to each other. There are telephones, of course, but conference calls are qualitatively different. Scale does matter. As a human rights issue, for people who don't have access, it is just as fundamental to human flourishing as clean air and water. Every policy you care about has something to do with the ability of people around the world to speak to each other. This simplicity was the plan of the US government. This was pushed by the National Science Foundation, yet the US does not own the Internet, and there is no patent on it. We have trouble speaking about the Internet because you can't see it. You can see people being shot in the street but you can't see the inability to communicate. We are at a very primitive stage in all of this; in ten years this conversation will seem ridiculous. We are like the monks that inhabited this priory in the history of the Internet. The problems we are trying to solve are political, not technical. They involve how to balance privacy and security, nations being able to enact national barriers in their own interests versus a global audience, and how to avoid the creation of an angry, resentful lower global class that lacks high-speed Internet access. The rise of nationalism and the end of globalism is a bad idea for the Internet. Countries of good faith could use their power over ISPs to get them to do several things: provide universal access within countries, interconnect with other ISPs around the world on an equal basis, and to protect privacy (they must work out what this means). You get on the board of ICANN through a smoke-filled room: there is no pretense, you just ascend. ICANN does only two things. The atomic idea of the Internet is just that each device has a number. The linking between those numbers and names is the domain name system. This issue of who was going to be in charge of the domain names was a hot potato—no one wanted to do this, neither Europe nor the US. So it was handed to ICANN. ICANN simply makes sure no one has the same domain name. ICANN is the wrong place for Internet governance—it was not designed to take on universal access, privacy and security, or content issues. Because it is the only barn on the landscape, it is being shot at. I would like ICANN to be what it is, which is boring—just names and numbers. We do need institutions that deal with digital inclusion, privacy and security, and interconnection. I think the United States has lost its global authority at this moment, so we need new institutions to deal with these issues. 31
Milton L. Mueller, Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies I will describe the course of US policy on the Internet—how it has become paralyzed by self-contradiction and how it fits into this debate on what the Internet should be about. There is generally a lack of vision on this issue. There are four things I will talk about. First, critical Internet resources: the names and numbers. Second, content regulation, which is still fundamentally national and has to deal with what we can put on the Internet without it being taken down. There are new forms of content regulation being pioneered by ICANN, in contrast to what Susan said. The third area is intellectual property protection. Finally, I will discuss how we handle cybersecurity and privacy. The United States made a fateful decision in the 1960s to have a physical infrastructure controlled by telephone companies and to open up the software that ran on top of that physical infrastructure. We pursued trade agreements to liberalize trade and information services. Countries, especially in Europe, were concerned about protecting their monopoly telecommunications companies. Therefore they went along with open trade and information services. When the Internet emerged, we were flying on the basis of these organic structures. When the Clinton administration was in charge of Internet governance, they made a conscious decision to leave this as much as possible in the hands of the private sector and that international institutions would be focused on boring international interconnectivity. It was private sector led contractual governance with formal representatives of civil society. Other countries realized that the United States was in control of this and ICANN had never given up control of the DNS. So the United States reasserted sovereignty by advancing the principle of multi-stakeholderism. It tried to legitimize ICANN by saying that it was a multi-stakeholder institution. President Bush faced pressure from conservatives to stop the triple X domain and also pressure to not have other governments involved. The United States decided to strengthen the governmental advisory body to give other nations more of a role in ICANN. WCIT to me was the latest in a ten-year battle over the role of sovereignty and governance. The idea that the 1988 treaty on International Telecommunications Regulations could take over the Internet is ridiculous. There is nothing in the WCIT final draft that would have done anything bad to the Internet. There was a non-binding resolution to say that the International Telecommunications Union is a place where we can discuss Internet governance. A lot of liberals didn't like that—the process by which it was passed or the substance of the resolution. So now we have a very confused situation. ICANN has a very mixed decision-making structure. For example, governments have demanded a right to veto top-level domains because they are sensitive. The United States could obviously not agree to this because of constitutional rights, but you can get away with this in ICANN because it is not a government institution.
Discussion The first question, raised by Ms. Roberts, concerned privacy. Where does a global expectation of privacy fit in? There is no expectation of privacy if one is working for a company and using a computer on the company's domain. The same applies for government employment. With ISPs, employers have all of this data, some of our personal information, and the content and externals of our emails. There are laws that cover this, but they do have this information. Are there conversations about what individual records are about externals (who you are communicating with) versus content? Dr. Crawford characterized this question as purely American. Supreme Court decisions say one has a constitutional right to privacy only if one has a reasonable expectation of privacy. The question of what that human 32
feeling of violation should be is a very serious question. This is exactly where we need new laws and institutions. Now we have tremendous asymmetries of information. The NSA and other organizations know exactly what is going on about the collection of data and the public knows very little. Mr. Forsberg agreed, saying that there has been a lot of trying to find solutions, which has put the clock back a number of years. Things are currently leaning even more towards protecting privacy. There is one proposal to have the right to erase your Internet footprint. There was also an article in this new directive talking about more stringent rules on countries outside the EU to get access to data on individuals, which was scrapped because of US lobbyists. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was kicked out of the EU because of privacy concerns. I am concerned that if we don't get a solution to the current problems, parliament will again require more stringent rules on privacy. The second question addressed to the panel was, if you could detach yourselves from your institutional agendas, what do you think a good outcome would look like? Dr. Crawford responded that the minimum requirements for Internet governance would consist of: you shall interconnect with other networks fairly, adhere to standard TCP-IP language, protect privacy, ensure security, and ensure universal high capacity access. Mr. Forsberg responded that the ideal would be something very light. The UN is discussing enhanced cooperation, for example. Dr. Mueller took a different view of what the “good” is. We have non-hierarchical models of network governance. Facilitating global, open communication militates totally against any of these other agendas. It prevents privacy rules and wealth redistribution that would ensure universal access. There is no problem with doing this at the national level. There could be a lot of cybersecurity goals that could be met through technical standards without dictating behavior. Privacy concerns should be left to local governments. The third question was, if every computer has a number, what is the relationship with attribution here? In many other areas we are clearly identified—at hotels, to fly, and in tax records for example. This is a basis of the rule of law, and its absence is why the Internet looks like the Wild West. It seems that we will need a personal ID on the Internet in the future—is it sustainable to have complete anonymity over time? On attribution, Dr. Mueller answered that through forensics one can track IP addresses, but these are easy to spoof. I am uncomfortable with identification. Device-linked verification is fine and is not linked to the human. What would be the implications of a global identification system? Who would run it? Can we trust other countries not to tamper with attribution? Can you get the United States, Russia, and China to agree on it? The Internet is only a Wild West from the perspective of someone who wants to control it. Dr. Crawford added, the fix for attribution may not be desirable—it would be PRISM. Laws on privacy and bank records are totally clear in the United States: there is no privacy. When you hand over records to a bank, you have no privacy expectation because the bank is carrying out your transaction. I am not troubled by perfect identification as an idea. The problem with PRISM is the asymmetry of the information. Particularly troubling is the collection of data without knowledge of collection and potential uses of the data, perhaps centuries hence, for blackmail. The pressure on speech is real in autocratic regimes. So those interests have to be balanced. If we find a way to protect speech in autocratic regimes, perfect identification makes perfect sense. A fourth question concerned the legal framework for privacy violations. Dr. Walt noted that there are lots of companies out there with access to all this information. Imagine that the head of a corporation or agency is sending emails, and a rogue systems administrator finds a juicy email and leaks it. Can that person sue the system administrator? Is the situation different for public figures and individuals, and between Europe and the United States? 33
Dr. Crawford responded, under US law, the only basis for suing would be an explicit contract saying that we will keep your information secure. Then the Federal Trade Commission would assist the individual. It is unlikely that this situation would obtain, however. The best we can do is to encourage providers to share information about their security practices. And where a giant breach of customer information occurs, customers must be notified. A fifth question concerned compromises between the United States and EU: what specifically should these compromises be? Dr. Crawford responded that on the privacy compromise, the EU ideal is that you own your data. That is practically unworkable. The compromise is that the United States has to have its companies be more careful about the use of data for commercial purposes, and the EU has to relax a bit about the ownership of information. One audience member suggested a parallel between open access and commercial trade liberalization. Historically, both of these goods were initially achieved through unilateral state leadership by dominant power—repeal of the corn laws by Great Britain, which lured others to follow suit, and the current US public good provision of the Internet. Dr. Mearsheimer concluded on a skeptical note, suggesting that we have not made a lot of progress on Internet governance in these discussions. It seems that the perceived seriousness of the threat will determine how effective these institutions are. Currently, governments do not think the threat is very great. Given this, we will not get effective institutions, period. The reason we got NATO and the EU was that in the 1940s and 1950s there was a strategic environment in Europe that created incentives for the formation of effective institutions. Barring a clear threat, we will not see effective Internet governance. Dr. Mueller countered that we are getting new international governance institutions. Intellectual property rights and cybersecurity are where institutions are forming and will continue to form. It is perilous to turn our back on workable models of decentralized Internet-based governance.
34
Closing Remarks Karl Kaiser, Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Director, Program on Transatlantic Relations, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Last year's conference was the twenty-fifth and we decided to look back twenty-five years and ahead twentyfive years. We decided that the Internet was too important to be only one of the many items we wanted to look at last year. This conference was the outcome. The fact that many of us have said “I don't really know much about this subject” over the course of the past few days shows the wisdom of choosing this topic. A purely subjective selection of a few points follows. One important point is that this is a subject that cuts across our established governmental structures. We must deal with it across all these structures. The same is true of the academic side. International relations scholars must take into account what is happening here and I don't think we have adequately dealt with it. The international relations specialists don't know the Internet specialists. It behooves us to think about the consequences of what is going on in this field. The word “anarchy” appeared several times. This is dialectical. The Internet empowers and creates more possibilities for the freedom of speech, but also enables phenomenally effective constraints. I was struck by the prediction that we have entered phase three of the evolution of this field—the “Internet of things.” Everybody has lots of items connected to Internet—nine networked devices per person in a few years. This may lead to a security disaster, huge opportunities for hackers, and a phenomenal task for governments. It is possibly only a decade ahead. I was struck also by the comparisons between the United States and Europe. Europe is not the big player in some areas. European data go through US machines. European negotiating power varies and is falling behind in many ways. Europe is also falling behind China in many ways. Something to think about for scholars is the extraordinary tension between public authorities and private actors. Google is extraordinary, and only has one comparison, the NSA. What does this mean for international relations theories of the future? I was also struck by the notion that democracies and authoritarian regimes will move to a common point somewhere in the middle. I was struck by the United States and China comparison with PRISM. I still think there is an enormous difference. United States data will never be used as it is in China to restrict the ability of people to speak. Nor is it used to put someone in prison. However it could be used to do so, which is the scary part. Can we trust that such data, as gathered, will always be used according to the rule of law? I do not think it is a foregone conclusion that the two systems will meet somewhere in the middle. At least, I am an optimist about the future of democracy. The Internet has become an agent of globalization. But repeatedly, the point has been made that national governments still play a strong role. The notion of territoriality is not gone. What kind of compromise will be made? This is a tremendous challenge for scholars and for decision-makers in the future. PRISM came up, and it will be very interesting to see how Obama addresses it in Berlin in the next few days and discusses it with a Europe very upset by these revelations. Ultimately this depends on the trust in handling the 35
data. Is it the trust that is at stake? Is Obama able to assure Americans and Europeans that the system can be trusted to preserve democracy? The danger is that this data collection will affect the behavior of individuals. I was also struck that there is a transnational link among social media based movements. We must consider what this means for the future. In 1848, people reacted across boundaries too, but ideas traveled through the printed word and took a long time. Now ideas travel immediately and protests immediately become a global event. Governments increasingly control the chokepoints of protest movements. The notion of control is embedded in the notion of national sovereignty. What sort of compromise between freedom and control will be found? This is a great task for political science. In the discussion of Turkey, it was said that social media is good for the “no” but not for the “go.” Social media does not yet lead to desirable results. A theory is required here from our discipline. We are grateful for the skeptics here who ask if social media really affects these things fundamentally. There was a provisional answer of no, but we must think about how the Internet will affect these crises moving into the future. We cannot say it doesn't matter: it will possibly matter, and we had better think about it. The schizophrenia of governments dealing with these issues has become apparent. We simultaneously build huge databases and promote the idea of the Internet as a bastion of free speech. We have not yet found the answer. I learned a great deal from the zero day exploits discussion. I am very concerned about these as an international relations scholar. It was repeatedly raised whether deterrence theory applies or not. If we can really attribute the source of the attack, it could work, but there still seems to be a fear of escalation if you really attack. There seems to be a hidden deterrence working at the moment. No one seems to be really sure what a world in which cyber war actually takes place would look like, so we had better be careful. There is a great deal of political confusion on these issues. They require technical knowledge and must be explained to the public and politicians. The T-TIP, transatlantic trade and investment program, which we have identified as a promising approach, has been insufficiently considered. I invite the experts to pick it up. In conclusion, we are in an era of lack of rules. The system cries for rules: anarchy is visible. Only when we have highly visible mishaps, perhaps, will rules be created. We are right in the middle of the creation of this regime. It reminds me of the middle of the seventeenth-century when international law was just beginning to emerge. We now have to develop rules for a world that is not international but transnational, with state and private actors, each with enormous power. I can only hope that we go home and try to be confused at a higher level but pay more attention to this field. Steven B. Bloomfield, Executive Director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University The origin of this conference is when Beth Simmons exhorted us to speak more about digital affairs. Beth, I hope, will continue to attend this conference, and I thank her for her support of this conference for the past seven years. You have been a great support, and Rob and Karl and I are greatly appreciative. The triumvirate that we are would not survive without Karl's constant attention to this conference. Karl has done so much, so tirelessly, and I hope this conference will long still be possible. We of course need to thank Pierre Keller, who has helped this conference transpire in this beautiful location for many years. Without his desire to promote the transatlantic ethos, we would not be here today. We thank you for everything you have done for us. 36
This was a particularly well-chaired meeting. Steve and Jim and John and Dan and Dick masterfully provided timekeeping and intellectual guidance—thank you very much. Of course we wouldn't be here without Marina's indulgence. Thank you, Gabriella Goldstein, also, for all you have done for us. This is such a comfortable environment but it the soul of Gabriella behind this that makes the greatest difference. We've had this transatlantic discussion for many years. We are given to understand at Harvard that there is another large ocean out there. In 2015, we are considering inaugurating a trans-Pacific discussion that may take place in Korea. We are in a priory and have a monastic setting in France and they would need to equal or better it. So we are looking at a Korean temple. In even numbered years, we will be here, and in odd numbered years, we may inaugurate a trans-Pacific dialogue. Many of my Asian affiliates have asked, what has taken you so long? We will inaugurate this with Karl and Pierre's blessing.
37
